metascience

So a bunch of physicists were at a conference, hearing about recent observations from the PAMELA satellite mission, when several of them pulled out cameras and started taking pictures of the results. And then some of those folks wrote up their own interpretations of the results and put them on the arXiv, the free repository for physics preprints. Nature has a story about it:

"We had our digital cameras ready," says Marco Cirelli, a theorist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and one of those who took pictures. The preprints fully acknowledge the source of the data and reference the presentation photographed.

Janet Stemwedel takes up this topic for discussion at her blog, Adventures in Ethics and Science:

From the point of view of a scientific community jointly engaged in trying to answer a certain constellation of questions, scientific communication is a good thing. And the scientists from the PAMELA team did present their results to members of their scientific community at various conferences.

But its sounds like, rather than lingering over the details of their data, they flashed a slide to show that there was some data forming the basis for their more general claims.

Everyone understands that scientific presentations are short and data-rich, but the "I've got data, and I'm not going to explain the details, nyah, nyah!" slide is bad form. This technique is precisely what hucksters do when they are trying to defraud or trick their audience. For scientists to resort to this, when they have multi-million-dollar public funding for their work, is not only disrespectful to the audience, it's a breach of ethics.

If some people see your presentation and have a good idea you haven't thought of, there is a sensible scientific response: Invite them to be coauthors. If you think those people are boorish goons who don't deserve the time of day, well, tough. Suck it up. This is science, not grade school. If your own work is not affected by their ideas, then offer to collaborate on a paper covering theirs. If you've already thought of their ideas, then tell them, "We've thought of that, and discuss it in our manuscript. Here's a copy."

Over the past few years, I've seen a lot of conference presentations where a fossil hominid was flashed on the screen for, literally, like 5 or 10 milliseconds. Like, one slide is there, then BOOM BOOM, and another slide is there and somehow in between there was a subliminal image of the fossil.

Fighter pilots used to train with a device called a "tachistoscope". It would flash images of planes up on a screen for a very short time -- the point was, you learned how to distinguish enemy planes at a quick glance, because that might be all you get. I've taken to calling these millisecond-slide routines "tachistoscopic" presentations, because, well mainly because they're pretty tacky. And also because they induce a similar skill. Someone with sharp eyes can pick out the important features of a bone after just a few milliseconds' exposure, especially with practice.

So there's actually very little point in showing these quick flashes. Any sufficiently knowledgeable observer is going to get the information that these presentations are attempting to obscure.

The entire point of presenting your work is so that colleagues who are less knowledgeable in your specialty will understand your results. Conferences are about communication, but that communication mainly happens in the bar between people who already know each other well. Conference presentations are about education: letting a broader community know what your work is about, and how it impacts their own. Sometimes, voices come out of that community, telling you things you might never have considered. They educate you. That's science.

That's why I don't generally report here on the presentations I see, except in general terms. People who present at conferences often develop their ideas further. I certainly do -- I give presentations on things I think are interesting and exciting, and I want to share them with lots of people. I don't see any benefit in keeping them secret, and I work on newsworthy topics. The scientific cost of not sharing and educating is a lot higher than any cost to my potential publicity after putting a paper into a prestige journal.

So giving a conference presentation where you flash your slides for 5 milliseconds is counterproductive. And increasingly ineffective, since if you're really worried about it, somebody with a $100 Flip camera can take good video of the whole thing and put your 5 millisecond picture on the Internet.

So nyah, nyah to that!

Read some blogs. You’ll find they all have different styles, different scopes, and different voices. Some scientists write blogs mostly about politics or religion. Others write mainly for educators, or for the public, or for their students. Some write mainly for other professionals, others include lots of pictures of their cats.

There are probably a hundred different approaches to blogging that might add to your scientific career, and you just have to find the voice that will work for you. In this series, I’m not advocating for any particular blogging style. Instead, I’m outlining strategies to help turn your own particular style into an asset for your research and your tenure dossier.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Russell Jacoby bemoans progress (paywall). He thinks that colleges aren't teaching people to revere the right nineteenth-century intellectuals:

The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be more pointed. If educated individuals were asked to name leading historical thinkers in psychology, philosophy, and economics, surely Freud, Hegel, and Marx would figure high on the list. Yet they have vanished from their home disciplines. How can this be?

In the case of Freud and Marx, because they were wrong. They built grand theories on a foundation of unobserved entities that don't exist. If you think they are still relevant to modern psychology and economics, your opinion isn't very ``informed.''

He goes on for an entire column this way. I see it as a surprising sign of hope that the academic fashions of the 1970's have given way.

On the subject of Hegel, I have to point you to Brian Leiter's take: "Please, Oh Please, Could You Publish Something about Philosophy by Someone Who Knows Something (even a little!) about the Subject?" in which he shows just how un-neglected Hegel has been.

Leiter ends with a note relevant to my current featured topic, blogging about your field:

For obvious reasons, intellectual tourists like Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Romano will regularly volunteer their amateurish musings about philosophy to [the Chronicle], since they aren't going to appear in any forum in which the editors know something about the subject.  That makes it even more imperative for philosophers to present their work and their discipline to a non-specialist audience.

Carl Wieman is a scientist at the University of British Columbia. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate (a state of matter that can be induced at extremely low temperatures). In recent years, he has spent much of his professional effort researching ways to improve science education.

I'm teaching "Biology of Mind" this fall, as I have in alternate years for several years. I even started the blog during an iteration of the class, and I also taught it in the fall of 2006. This class is very challenging, very large and very interdisciplinary, involving seniors and graduate students from philosophy, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology, zoology, and psychology. I take on the class because I enjoy the continued challenge of teaching this material to such a diverse group of students.

I use the course as an experiment ground for new methods. This year I have a few more new things to try -- watch this space in September if you're interested. In the meantime, I am keeping notes on some other peoples' opinions about science education.

When I teach, I emulate excellent teachers I've had in anthropology and in the humanities. A few exceptional science courses I took as an undergraduate and graduate student fit this discursive model, most were relatively dry lectures. I have many failings as a teacher, but standing and lecturing on material is really not my style.

So in an article about Wieman's current research, I was interested to see this:

Wieman’s initiative at UBC is now looking at how to implement discipline-based education research. He says that science teaching is already beginning to change as the university community learns that becoming an expert is not only about the factual knowledge of a subject.

He pointed to the humanities as a model. “The humanities wouldn’t think of a lecturer coming into class and simply reading Shakespeare to students,” he said. “The students read the content and then come to class and discuss.”

“We’re still learning that in physics.”

Of course we've all had those professors who teach a class on a work of literature, and only accept their own interpretation of the work as a legitimate answer. In science, the Socratic style has the potential to be even worse, degenerating into the Ferris-Bueller-like, "anyone...anyone..." kind of questioning. It takes work to get students to follow a chain of reasoning and take the steps on their own.

Wieman's work assesses methods that try to train people think scientifically, and he finds that traditional models often make things worse:

Wieman developed a survey to learn more about whether taking intro science classes helped students think about science more like scientists. For example, he asked whether they “think about the physics they encounter in everyday life” and whether “it is possible to explain physics ideas without mathematical formulas.” The results showed that students are in fact emerging from intro classes thinking more like a novices -- and less like real scientists -- than they did before they took the course.

I suppose much in this demonstration depends on how one defines thinking like a "real scientist." Maybe Wieman's priorities are not the same as many other scientists. But should be no surprise that merely explaining some topics, without making students engage with observations may actually reduce their comprehension. I find that students who've had the "modern human origins" problem explained to them in a science class almost invariably have closed their minds to many logical possibilities, only because those weren't presented as alternatives in lectures. When the lectures are incomplete (as all lectures are), promising students may learn the incorrect idea that all promising research avenues have been taken.

Wieman himself has written a sort of manifesto, now published at LiveScience.

While there is still much to be learned, there is enormously more known now than existed when the teaching methods in use in most college classrooms today were introduced and standardized. Briefly summarizing a large field, research has established that people do not develop true understanding of a complex subject like science by listening passively to explanations.

True understanding only comes through the student actively constructing their own understanding through a process of mentally building on their prior thinking and knowledge through "effortful study". This construction of learning is dependent on the epistemologies and beliefs they bring to the subject and these are readily affected (positively or negatively) by instructional practices. Furthermore, we know that expert competence is made up of several features.

In addition to factual knowledge, experts have unique mental organizational structures and problem solving skills that facilitate the effective retrieval and useful application of that factual knowledge. These also facilitate further learning of related material. Experts also have important metacognitive abilities; they can evaluate and correct their own understanding and thinking processes. The development of these expert "beyond factual" competencies are some of the new ways of thinking that students must construct on their path to "expertness."

OK, that decayed toward the end into some edu-mumbo-jumbo. But as an instructor, what I take from this is the importance of conveying not just stories and explanations, but the habits of mind that lead to scientific reasoning. With my more difficult courses, I call this developing a "common sense" version of science. For example, on several occasions I worked my genetics course through the reasons why an apparently deleterious allele might nevertheless be at an appreciable frequency in a population -- something that common sense suggests shouldn't happen. This is an example where one observation should immediately bring several hypotheses to mind, along with the ways that they might be tested. Each of these tests is science.

I guess that would be "beyond factual" competency.

Sabine Hossenfelder (BackReaction) has written some extended thoughts about the "marketplace of ideas" in science, and some of the ways it may have gone wrong. Her thoughts are focused on her field, theoretical physics, but many of them will apply to evolutionary biology and human evolution -- mainly because both are fields with a lot of media attention and where long-term projects may transcend the demands of short-term grant support.

The topic deserves wider discussion. I like many of the points she makes, and rather than quoting extensively, just recommend that you read it if you're interested.

One thing that I appreciate is the way that she emphasizes the "selection pressures" intrinsic in the academic system, both in terms of funding, attention from peers, and attention from the press. The structural problem is that one of science's major goals -- results that make new scientific advances possible -- may not be judged for many years after the results are made. So the quality of science is judged by other criteria: how popular a research agenda is with peers, how much attention it can attain, or how much grant funding a researcher acquires. Each is driven by social factors external to science, and these direct effort in ways that may not necessarily lead to long-term results.

She posits that different fields may be distorted by these pressures in different ways:

The results of such strategies are especially pronounced if competitive pressure is high and the selection works very fast, which in turn creates a system populated by scientists that did well under the present circumstances and thus see no reason to change it.

This jibes with my experience in genomics, where there are many short-term research positions and a lot of turnover between academia and industry. It is less true of evolutionary science. Even though single-authored papers have become less and less the norm, it is still possible for a single researcher to generate a long-term research agenda and support it with shoestring funding. Many of the senior respected evolutionary biologists are of this type. Field biology (and anthropology) will probably always retain this single-researcher model, even though collaborations have brought people together onto long-term projects.

I also appreciated her thoughts on interdisciplinary research and changing fields:

In the present system it is almost impossible for a researcher to change fields without risking severe drawbacks for his/her career. One of the reason is that researchers are hired into specific tasks, and for these nobody would be hired who hasn't previously worked on the field. Another problem is that grants typically require having former publications in a field to document expertise. It has been realized already decades ago that progress very often comes from interdisciplinary exchange. It is quite ironic that lots of funding goes into such new inter-disciplines while the possibility for researchers to just change between fields (or even sub-fields!) is hindered. Solution again: Have faith in people who have proved to do good research and just let them follow their interest.

One of the main reasons for my research successes has been that I apply methods and data from many fields. Institutional support for that kind of work has been very high -- university administrators love interdisciplinary efforts. This may be because administrators are among the few people who actually have to talk to people in different fields for their jobs! Or, more cynically, because the more different departments interact, the less they agitate against each other for resources.

But structural support for this kind of research from granting agencies has been very low. There are some programs that encourage interdisciplinary applications, but these tend to require multiple PIs (each experts in their fields) or solicit funding requests only for very specific areas -- "funding priorities."

As a final note, the comments are also worth reading -- if for no other reason than to see how much the way young physicists think of their field overlaps with young biological scientists.

And for this quote, from Nobel-winner J. J. Thomson:

If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do no come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it.

This is the first of a four-part series on blogging and tenure. Each installment covers a different portion of the tenure process, from starting and establishing the tone of your blog, up to documenting your blog for your tenure dossier. I don't guarantee anything, and I certainly don't have all the answers, but I worked hard to develop some strategies in my tenure chase, and you may find some of them helpful.

Last month, the University of Wisconsin officially granted me tenure. So, I can say without any doubt (if other examples had not been sufficient), it is absolutely possible to write a daily, high-profile blog and still be recognized by your colleagues as a scholar. In fact, it is possible to blog, do good research, and earn tenure at a Research I university.

That seems like progress, compared to the situation four years ago when I began blogging. A few high-profile tenure denials in late 2005, including physicist Sean Carroll and political scientist Daniel Drezner, made it seem like a blog might be the kiss of death for a research reputation. Inside Higher Education ran a story on the subject, as did Slate, with the melodramatic title, "Attack of the Career-killing Blogs". Since I was interviewed in that article, I suppose I should have been a little nervous (I wrote about it here).

Happily things have changed. With the rise of science blogging, people have become much more aware of the ways that a blog can contribute to a career in science. If you establish a readership, the chances are your colleagues will find out about your blog themselves, instead of looking at you in befuddlement. Blogs are not research, but in some fields they have become an important part of the process of networking and critical commentary. A well-written blog is far from a liability to a scientific career, and may be a real boon.

However, the transition to a blogging professoriate has barely begun. A large fraction of today's science bloggers are graduate students. Some have finished their degrees within the past few years, moved on to postdocs and to assistant professorships. Starting on the tenure track exposes young researchers to some unexpected minefields, and there are special challenges when a blog is involved.

Other young researchers may be reading and using blogs intensively and wondering whether it would be worthwhile to start writing. I was in the same situation some four years ago, so I know the feeling.

I'm writing these posts to share my experience. I spent a lot of time evaluating and preparing my blog for the tenure process. From the beginning, I knew that blogging would be only a minor aspect of my tenure review, because the focus of tenure evaluation at UW is research activity. My main goal was to highlight the ways that my blog has enhanced my research and public service presence, and to show that blogging does not detract from my research agenda. I succeeded in those goals, using a number of strategies along the way that may be useful for other people approaching their tenure reviews. Some of these strategies are common sense; others may surprise you.

I realize that I have embarked on a different project than many science bloggers. Most of my words have to do with my field of study. Many blogs include a broader mix of commentary, including political and social subjects. Since I'm an avid reader of many different kinds of blogs, I can comment to some extent on the ways that different subjects and tones may be incorporated into a professional career.

The full story is divided into four parts. In the final installment, which may be most useful to current bloggers, I will describe the specific strategies that I applied to quantify my blog's role as a service to the field and to the public. Over the next two weeks, I'll be discussing strategies to build a blog's reputation and readership in the years leading up to tenure review, and some ways to integrate research with blogging.

Today, I weigh the pluses and minuses of starting a blog on the tenure track, including the key question of anonymity. This will be especially relevant if you are newly on the tenure track and considering starting a blog. You may also find some of it useful if you have a blog already and are considering shedding a pseudonym and making a blog part of your academic life.

A nice article in the May Scientific American by writer Fredric Heeren reviews the new Turkana Basin Institute:

Researchers now claim to have found a way to collect fossils quickly while motivating the people to protect their heritage, a plan that involves a shift from 10-week field seasons to 50 weeks of fossil collecting annually.

The activity will fall under the aegis of the newly formed Turkana Basin Institute (TBI). Guided by Richard Leakey, his wife Meave and daughter Louise, it has raised $2.1 million to build a permanent field station at Ileret, east of Lake Turkana. Since April 2007, this camp has been transformed from a few tents into a field worker's wish list: a stone lab with plenty of curatorial space, staffed kitchens, metal prefab buildings and a garage with a full-time mechanic. The directors hope that year-round work will accelerate fossil recovery fivefold. Next year a second station will be built on the lake's west side.

The article goes slightly into some disagreements about the role of the institute and its relationship to ongoing field sites.

The TBI, connected to Stony Brook University has a website, which is very slick-looking -- but its captions sloppily still include Latin filler instead of actual information. I hope they get a discount on the design!

Anyway, it generally sounds like a good idea. Considering the number of permanent year-round field stations in primatology, it only makes sense to have such a facility for productive paleoanthropological field sites. I only wish there were more field sites that justified the investment!

So last year, Nature did an editorial about "cognitive enhancement" drugs, and now they've done a web survey to follow up on the editorial, asking their readers to comment on whether they've used prescription or other drugs for enhancing their performance. It's been widely reported that this is a survey of scientists (Nature's main audience), although being a web survey it's probably not all that representative.

The magazine reports on the results this week:

One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory. Use did not differ greatly across age-groups (see line graph, right), which will surprise some.

The graph mentioned shows that the 60-year-olds dose themselves just as much as 30-year-olds, and nearly as much as those less than 25. The main drugs are Ritalin, Provigil, beta blockers (which combat anxiety), and Adderall. The number who use these under prescriptions is dwarfed by those using them illicitly.

But here's what I find interesting:

The most popular reason for taking the drugs was to improve concentration. Improving focus for a specific task (admittedly difficult to distinguish from concentration) ranked a close second and counteracting jet lag ranked fourth, behind 'other' which received a few interesting reasons, such as "party", "house cleaning" and "to actually see if there was any validity to the afore-mentioned article".

In other words, some proportion of the respondents started using drugs because they read about it in Nature.

Jeez, I wonder what other things people start believing just because they read it in Nature...

That's what the New York Times seems to be suggesting:

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Um...not me.

The problem seems to come from unoriginality -- if your blogging strategy is being the absolute first person to point to some other story (the examples in the story are mostly tech writers), then you have to be awake and waiting for it.

Mr. Lam, who as a manager has a substantially larger income, works even harder. He is known to pull all-nighters at his own home office in San Francisco -- hours spent trying to keep his site organized and competitive. He said he was well equipped for the torture; he used to be a Thai-style boxer.

"I've got a background getting punched in the face," he said. "That's why I'm good at this job."

Let's just say I'm not in that kind of competition.

In the current Science, Elizabeth Pennisi reports on Ethiopia's efforts to bring more resources and tourism to its fossil heritage:

Then in 2003, that lab [at the National Museum, built in 1982] was razed to make way for a six-story, modern structure that includes a two-floor library, a 500-person auditorium, and 200 rent-free offices, plus storage and study space for more than a million specimens. The three wings are devoted to paleontology and archaeology; art and history; and administrative, conservation, and educational spaces.

...

Foreign aid is helping: France is supplying furniture, and Japan may outfit the hominid spaces. Everyone involved is thrilled and not just with the prospect of more space. "It shows how much emphasis has been given [to research]," says Ethiopian native and paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio. "In a country that has a lot of needs, the government could have easily used that money for something else."

The article includes a map showing the impressive array of 25 active archaeological or paleontological field sites across the country. The funding and effort are also being devoted to training students -- not only in paleontology but across the sciences -- including the establishment of new universities.

One of the more controversial areas is tourism -- including the encouragement of travel to active research areas:

At the same time, "one of the most important things that needs to happen is the integration of tourism and science," says [anthropologist Tim] White. And that, too, is happening. National Geographic has pledged support for an educational center at the village nearest to Hadar, home of the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy. With better roads under construction, "it could easily be a destination spot for tourists," [anthropologist Donald] Johanson predicts. Exhibit plans are still taking shape, but there likely will be casts of Lucy and other fossil hominids, as well as photographs from the site.

This raises fears (by some) that the sites will be more vulnerable to destruction by trampling and looting. On the other hand, bringing a better transportation infrastructure is bound to improve matters for the scientific research teams, possibly including the most enduring problem -- security.

Personally, I wonder whether such projects can be a financial success. Many of the paleontological museums in the American West are a great experience for visitors because you can get close to the original (and often still-active) sites, see original specimens, and do it all without the huge crowds of urban natural history museums. But that's the point: there are no huge crowds of people. These are substantial tourist draws for small towns in the West, but they aren't often making back the substantial federal or state grants that help to build them. It's an important cultural resource and a valuable investment, but it may not be realistic to expect small regional Ethiopian museums to draw premium paleo-tourist dollars.

References:

Pennisi E. 2008. Rocking the cradle of humanity. Science 319:1182-1183. doi:10.1126/science.319.5867.1182

Janet Stemwedel (of Adventures in Ethics and Science) has been following the aetosaur scandal, and has followed up with two posts looking for suggestions about how junior scientists and graduate students should respond to unethical behavior by their senior colleagues.

In most senses, it is not fair to generalize about ethical problems across different sciences. The fundamental issues of money, data access, learning curve, and potential for new approaches are too different: Paleoanthropology poses its own ethical dilemmas that would never occur in chemistry, for example.

But in many ways, the students in different disciplines share much more with each other than the professionals do -- and junior scientists share more than senior scientists do. Each discipline is a guild with its own political structure and barriers to advancement, but from the bottom looking up they all look pretty similar.

The first of Stemwedel's posts, Ask an ethicist: How can I stand up to misbehavior in my field? begins with an anecdote and profers a bevy of suggestions of how to respond. But the interesting thing about these posts are the comments. I don't generally dive into people's comment sections to link, but I want to give some flavor of the discussion and why it's worth reading.

Commenter Will S. brings some thoughts about students:

Almost all of the scoops and thefts and other violations I experienced victimized a student. Students catch it twice in [Vertebrate Paleontology] because limited funding puts them at the mercy of a large number of professors at school while a deep gulf between "student" and "professional" status marginalizes them among the professional community. When student work is scooped, they're given the options to quit or start over--even when, as in the several cases I experienced, the scooping academic was invited in by one or more members of the student's committee. Student work makes up a giant proprotion of presentations and posters at VP conferences, and since student work is regarded (by some more than others) as a kind of gray literature, it is fair game for intellectually bankrupt academics; students even rip off other students in this environment. Student papers pass through the publication process more slowly than others do, and usually involve more reviewers, lending themselves to cherry picking; I'm not alone, I'm sure, in walking into a conference and hearing my ideas recited verbatim by someone who had just reviewed my manuscript for Journal X.

Taking the comments together, they all illustrate one general observation: The really offensive cases of plagiarism, data theft, and other bad behavior are carried out by people who already are masters of the strategies junior people can use for redress, and who therefore are well situated to game the system in order to get away with it. This includes recruiting their own departments' and universities' administrative apparatus in their support, using their positions on editorial boards to quash challenges, and using their professional network contacts against their would-be accusers.

In this context, all the platitudes and legalistic advice offered by administrators really amounts to CYA window-dressing. Advisors know this, and many suggest sub rosa that students accommodate themselves to theft -- often sharing their own stories of being jerked over, once upon a time.

So the second post, Senior scientists, give us some good news! tries to draw out senior people who have helped junior colleagues in such situations. Unfortunately, Stemwedel doesn't find many. The bottom line appears to be that genuine abuses occur and that whistle-blowing is rarely rewarded and always damaging to an individual's career.

Late in the discussion, commenter CC throws some water on the fire, which probably should serve as a disclaimer to the whole discussion:

I really hope that no one makes a decision about what field to go into based on a handful of anecdotes from commenters with a range of axes to grind and no knowledge of other fields.

A good point, since this is a highly self-selected group of commenters, each writing from his or her own distinct perspective.

Anyway, in any individual case it is hard to distinguish between a student holding a grudge after a misunderstanding about his role in a research project, and a senior scientist really abusing his position and influence by stealing ideas. Most outsiders will judge such cases according to the reputations of the people involved, and unfortunately for students, they don't have one yet. So outsiders will judge according to what they know about other students, which is usually not especially positive.

I'm not sure the suggestion of "record-keeping" will help very much, since most students and junior scientists don't enter into collaborations with written contracts about who will take on what responsibilities and how credit will be shared. One of the appealing aspects of science is that it is an area where many deals are still sealed by a handshake -- but this means that disagreements may be hard or impossible to adjudicate.

That's problem enough, but in science, peer judgment occurs anonymously and secretly -- not only in journal reviews, but also in tenure and promotion reviews. This situation means that a junior scientist would be near-insane to make waves.

Happily, in most fields there is more work to do than there are people to do it. Good ideas come in limited quantities, and it is always tempting to borrow them. Still, if data are easy to find, then a young person can apply someone else's ideas on a new set of observations. That's what we call "normal science."

But in some fields, the data are also highly limited. Conflicts arise when both ideas and the opportunities to apply them are at a premium. If money is also limited, that introduces an even worse problem -- since the competition for money depends on past results. Vertebrate paleontology is such a field. Paleoanthropology is another.

I think that strong abuses, such as plagiarism and stealing research results, are rare in paleoanthropology. However, a large number of students are deterred from the field, or have their careers stopped before they really begin, because the system is obviously not designed to protect students from such abuses.

One thing that paleoanthropology has going in its favor is that the journals have developed a healthy tolerance for repetition. After all, if the number of ideas is limited, and the number of specimens are limited, then we are bound to see a lot of the same studies replicated on the same specimens -- albeit with minor differences in method. How many studies have there been on the cranial diversity of Lower Pleistocene humans? Fifty?

It's a symptom of a field in which students are given nothing better to do than to replicate twenty-year-old research. This helps to protect them -- at least they aren't competing with established scientists for access to new specimens -- but it protects the interests of the established scientists also. Money is always going to be tight, and everything tends to concentrate it in the hands of a few.

If I were starting out in the field today, I'd think long and hard about what kinds of data may be easily accessed or are freely available. It's enough to risk failure -- but the risk of success coupled with theft of results or denial of access is really too much to bear.

This story (from the Wired blog) is making the rounds: terabytes of storage space on Google servers free to scientific projects that want to share data openly:

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

This seems like a promising option for some (although probably not all) paleoanthropology datasets. Because it helps to address two of the biggest issues. One (at the top of everyone's awareness) is data access. But even though that's troubling to many people, I would say a bigger threat is the long-term future of datasets as the original collectors retire, lose interest, die, become crotchety (not that I know any that are crotchety...). Google is free, and they keep backups!

Paleontologist Neil Shubin has a guest post on Pharyngula, describing his experience preparing for an appearance on The Colbert Report. Shubin is the discoverer of Tiktaalik and author of the current book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.

Being a scientist on the show carries with it some challenges. We need to convey facts of science correctly and do so in a way reveals how fun our science is to do and to think about. We need to educate, enlighten, and excite. The challenge is we need to do this in 5 minutes with Stephen Colbert sitting across the table. To make matters worse, the show does not tell you the tack Colbert is going to take in advance, largely because so much of what he does is ad lib.

Colbert has become the one place on television where you are most likely to see prominent scientists (of course, mostly hawking their books). I think Shubin's post is very interesting, as a reflection on how you prepare for a 5-minute interview. What he doesn't mention is that every scientist's education should include preparation for 5 minute interviews -- because that's exactly what we have to do hundreds of times as we are looking for work.

So students, read and learn!

With New Year's just behind us, I'm betting that precisely nobody has made the resolution to do more reviews of papers, or faster reviews, or better reviews.

Well, maybe you should, according to two letters in this week's Science. First, William Perrin laments his problems finding qualified reviewers:

If an average acceptance rate of 50% is assumed, and if each paper needs at least two reviews, then each paper published represents at least four reviews. Following this logic, if you publish three or four papers a year, you should be doing at least 12 to 16 reviews. Anything less means that you are sloughing off the work to others who are perhaps less knowledgeable and capable than you in your specialty, and you should not be upset when someone reviewing a paper of yours "doesn't have a clue."

Then, Robert Zucker provides some tips -- which mainly say, "Ease up, people":

Reviewers make two common mistakes. The first mistake is to reflexively demand that more be done. Do not require experiments beyond the scope of the paper, unless the scope is too narrow. Avoid demanding that further work apply new techniques and approaches, unless the approaches and techniques used are insufficient to support the conclusions. There is no need to require more tests of conclusions that have been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, and conversely, authors need not exclude every possible explanation for their results. Suggest an additional experiment, further analysis, or altered interpretation, but do not make publication contingent on these changes. If the conclusions cannot stand without additional work or if the evidence does not distinguish between reasonably likely alternatives, recommend that the editor reject the manuscript.

The second mistake often made by reviewers is failing to consider all of the journal's goals and requirements, including standards and guidelines stated in the editorial policy and gleaned from its articles....

There's quite a bit more there in that second paragraph.

I tend to write long detailed reviews, and they tend to take me a long time, and, well, that's never good. The papers never seem to take any of the comments, anyway. So I think I'll make it my resolution to write short reviews. Although, if Perrin is to be believed, this will probably wind up with me getting more of them.

Imagine you are on the search committee for a department of anthropology conducting a search for an assistant professor. Now, imagine that you discover that a large fraction of the applicants for your job are sharing information with each other about the status of your search.

Sound disconcerting? Maybe destabilizing? Certainly subversive. Well, that's exactly what cultural anthropology job candidates are doing, following leads in fields from sociology to philosophy. They've set up a wiki where they can update the status of ongoing academic searches, all anonymously.

The wiki is very simple: a list of institutions conducting searches, put into simple categories ("Haven't heard from," "Received a letter of rejection from," "Have scheduled on campus interview with").

So, if you've made an offer to a candidate but are still negotiating, and haven't yet notified the rest of the short list (not to mention the rest of your applicants!): Guess what? They may already know.

You may wonder: is it really in a candidate's interest to report on her progress with you?

Certainly it's altruistic. There are a lot of people out there who will never hear back from a search they have applied to -- not even a simple acknowledgment of the application.

It's progressively less and less anonymous as the candidate rises in the applicant pool -- she may first have a conference interview, or find out that letters have been solicited, later she reach the short list or ultimately be made an offer. At some point, sharing information about a search could be off-putting to future colleagues. And it can be surprisingly painful to let people know about the job you almost got, but in the end didn't.

On the other hand, the top candidates may be on several short lists, and may have multiple offers. Letting the rest of the field know about the status of these jobs -- even if they don't know your identity -- may help clear the decks. Despite the esprit de corps of the ABD's, altruism at some level doesn't entirely capture the dynamic.

On a related note, it's amazing how rarely people even bother to Google potential job candidates. It's a different world out there these days, and while an academic job search may be aimed toward inducting a top candidate into a very ancient profession, the rules keep changing all the time...

P.S. If you're in the job-hunting boat, and starting to feel unappreciated -- like, when are they going to call? Why not you? Is there something wrong with your work? Etc., then read this post from New Kid on the Hallway and remember it's not about you.

New Kid's a medieval historian, but the story is much the same: job ads are mostly written by lawyers, job searches rarely go in predictable directions, and search committees rarely know exactly what they are looking for. If you think the ad fits you exactly, that still doesn't mean that they'll see it the same way.

(via Savage Minds)